Hardly any day passes on PaGaLGuY when you don’t see a flurry of spam posts made against some b-school, corporates, professors, etc. The posts come from different IDs and are thus near impossible to stop. In last few days, the posts are turning more and more obscene and vulgar when earlier they were only derogatory. If the trend continues, then we will very soon start seeing phishing links or obscene media getting posted which, although it may not be a legal issue as most of the participating audience on this forum are adults, but still will be a cause of embarrassment for many.

These posts eclipse the more relevant posts in the threads of our interest. The question, thus, is how to control this growing menace. Should there be some level of scrutiny before each and every post gets published or should there be some other measures like detecting obscene words in the posts and then blocking both the post and the user? I may not be the best person to provide the tips to the team of moderators but still I would like to give my two cents as an acknowledgment for their effort to keep this wonderful portal up for aspirants like me.

1. Enabling Captcha for each post: This mechanism could keep bots away from re-posting same stuff over and over again on different threads.

2. Time Restriction: There could be some cooling time period between each post for a particular user. A point to be noted here is that this may not be the case for replies on a post.

3. Increased Moderator Head Count: This could be one viable option. The count may vary from one moderator handling one to as many as five threads at a time. I believe that many people will volunteer to act as a Mod.

4. User Registration: The process of user registration can be improved by adding features like uploading a scanned photo id proof to have more authentic users than fake ids. The other option could be to link each user account to one mobile number. Thus the account can be activated only when user puts in code received at the time of registration. Thus people with only one cell number won’t be able to create more than one account.

5. Bad Word Filter: There could be some mechanism to scan the post, before it gets committed on a thread, of a particular set of already defined bank of bad words. If bad words are returned, then the options could range from replacing those words with asterisk (*) or may be blocking that post as well as the user.

These would be some of my suggestions to keep the spam away from the forum we all love. Readers are welcome to add more points based on their technical expertise.